“EUC allows workers to continue to cover their families’ basic expenses and in many cases enables workers to go through training programs so they can focus on their job search and re-enter the market with new and needed skills,” Owens said.

Many congressional Republicans oppose renewing the federal program on the grounds that extended benefits deter recipients from active job searching and that the expense is a further drain on the federal budget.

But economist Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, calculates that the extended benefits cutoff will cost almost twice as much in lost economic growth because of a reduction in consumer spending than the $44 billion it would cost the government to keep the program going for another year.

Groups lobbying for extended benefits hope that Congress will tack a year-long extension onto a larger bill that is likely to pass by the end of the year. The alternative would be a separate bill that would face more opposition.

Some Democrats in both the House and Senate support including extended benefits in the large deficit-reduction package. But the congressional “supercommittee” proposal for that package said it was unable to reach agreement by its Nov. 21 deadline.

The co-chairs issued a statement Wednesday that “we have come to the conclusion that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.”